Minnesota’s apostle of hate

Keith Ellison is Minnesota’s incumbent Fifth District congressman, deputy chairman of the Democratic National Committee and DFL candidate for Minnesota attorney general. He was a long-time apostle of hate on behalf of Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam, though the local Minnesota media haven’t gotten around to revisiting the issue as Ellison seeks statewide office. Now he is an apostle of hate on behalf of the causes of the increasingly mainstream far left of the Democratic Party.

Speaking last week at a debate with GOP candidate Doug Wardlow, Ellison explained that he had operated under the impression that Farrakhan “had some things to offer.” Well, that’s the problem. As an advocate of Farrakhan and active member of the Nation of Islam hate cult, Ellison never dissented from a single doctrine of the creed according to Farrakhan.

When Ellison won the primary contest for the DFL attorney general nomination in August, I thought Ellison’s support for cop killers and terrorists peculiarly unfitted him for the office. Drawing on contemporaneous press accounts as well as his 2000 National Lawyers Guild speech in support of Symbionese Liberation Army terrorist Kathleen Soliah/Sara Jane Olson — the terrorist in my neighborhood — I took a look back at this aspect of Ellison’s career in the Weekly Standard column “Can Keith Ellison turn lawman?”

In his National Lawyers Guild speech Ellison spoke favorably of cop killers Mumia Abu-Jamal and “Assata Shakur” (Joanne Chesimard), who is wanted for the murder of New Jersey state trooper Werner Foerster in 1973. Chesimard was convicted of that murder but escaped from prison in 1979 and has been on the lam in Cuba since 1984. Bryan Burrough’s Days of Rage has a riveting account of Chesimard’s terrorist career. In 2013, the FBI made Chesimard the first woman named to its Most Wanted Terrorists List. The FBI has offered a reward of up to $1,000,000 for her capture.

Ellison prayed for Chesimard in his National Lawyers Guild speech: “I am praying that Castro does not get to the point where he has to really barter with these guys over here because they’re going to get Assata Shakur, they’re going to get a whole lot of other people,” he told the crowd. “I hope the Cuba[n] people can stick to it, because the freedom of some good decent people depends on it.”

In 2006 Greg Lang dug up the text of Ellison’s speech as edited by Ellison himself and posted it on a site Lang dedicated to the Soliah case. Fearing that the site might disappear, as it has, I posted the speech in its entirety here on Power Line. To say the least, it reveals Ellison to be hostile to impartial enforcement of the law and indifferent to the lives of police officers. It is a shocking speech that betrays his unfitness for any public office, let alone attorney general. Then Star Tribune metro columnist Katherine Kersten devoted a column to Ellison’s National Lawyers Guild speech at the time Lang dug it up. When she sought out Ellison he declined to comment on his current view of Soliah/Olson or Chesimard/Shakur and he has not been asked about it since.

The Minnesota media have proved remarkably incurious about Ellison’s past. This weekend the St. Paul Pioneer Press takes a deep dive into Wardlow’s early teenage years in a story alleging he harassed a gay high school classmate. The contrast in the media treatment of the candidates is sickening.

The Minnesota media have declined to hold Ellison to account. They have left it to Doug Wardlow to draw attention to this unsavory and highly relevant aspect of Ellison’s career. Confident that he will never be called on it, Ellison continues to lie about it with, well, audacity. In the video below, Doug tells the still too little known truth about Keith Ellison.